Medieval writers cast Muhammad’s tomb as a mirror-image anti-Jerusalem

Evidence

Guibert asserts that the Saracens worship the relics of their prophet; Embrico and Gautier describe this worship in vivid terms … This imagined cultic center of the Saracen world, the floating tomb of Muhammad at Babel/Mecca, is a sort of mirror image of the crusaders’ Jerusalem, an anti-Jerusalem: just as Christian pilgrims journey to Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem, Saracen pilgrims flock to the floating tomb of their false prophet and god. It is also meant to explain the power and attraction of Islam to the numerous Saracens. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 780

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘anti-Jerusalem’ mirroring recalls the moral-panic and demonization dynamics in the reader’s prior note on ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’; both show how rivals get inverted images of one’s own sacred center.
• DEFINE: Introduces the useful concept of the ‘anti-Jerusalem’ — a fabricated mirror-center projected onto an enemy faith.